


and blessed are those who can never look back

by cuneifire (orphan_account)



Series: Author's Favourites [12]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Historical References, Relationship Study, that feeling where you just can't sit still any longer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 15:15:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18719659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/cuneifire
Summary: “She still has dreams. They go like this; she’s running and running and running, but she doesn’t know where it’s too, she’s just sprinting into a haze of mist that blurs into fiery red at the edges, and her breath is ragged and her heart won’t stop beating, and she looks to her side only to see that he’s right there, beside her, and slowly the mist clears and she's that little girl in the plains again, that little girl who stuck knives in boy with pretty smiles and sharp words, and her grin could cut glass the same way her heartbeat slices bone. The sky stretches out over her, endless and endless and endless.Those are the best dreams. The bad ones are where he isn’t there at all. The worst ones are when he leaves.”Or; Hungary was born running. Makes sense she’d fall for a boy who couldn’t sit still.





	and blessed are those who can never look back

The first thing she remembers is the sky, spread wide and blue and endless above her, plains as far as the eye can see, nothing she couldn't reach if she just got there fast enough.

Hungary was born running, her breath scraping against her throat and her legs burning like she’d been walking through fire and hadn’t had time to dust off the ashes. Her muscles had been tensed up like a wind-up doll, and the wind had been in her hair and she would forever hold that inescapable feeling of being  _free,_ lost, beholden to no one.

Sitting still has always felt unnatural, and she wonders if that’s because she was meant to be in motion.

.

Prussia has eyes like Hell and a smile to match, and his ego takes up more space than he does. The first thing he does when he meets her is tell her he’s going to save her, and when she raises an eyebrow he says  _Don’t worry, it’s only so I can kill you later,_ and that makes her smile,because in the time it had taken him to brag she’s cocked an arrow and shot it straight through his wrist, pinning him to a tree. Blood splatters over his wrist up to his elbow, giving his skin a darker pallor, so she leaves him likes that, wondering what it’d look like if she’d smeared blood on his lips instead of his hands, because his mouth looks vicious as he smiles (all teeth, Prussia’s smiles were always teeth and his grins never showed his eyes) and she wonders if blood would make it worse or better.

She runs, of course. And it takes him from sunrise to sundown, but he finds her. He’s out of breath and bewildered, and she will forever not ask him if it was from the joy of running or the pain of heaving the tendons torn out of his wrist. He would never answer, of course.

.

The Ottoman Empire keeps a collection of pinned butterflies in his study. Everything from monarchs to swallowtails to blue morphos, and so many she can’t name. She never cared much for the names anyway, she’d always preferred actions to words.

The room turns into her favorite one after Mohács, because he’s always too busy for pinned butterflies, he has more important things to attend to (execution, men strung up by their wrists, people pinned to walls with throwing knives and needles, blood on the floors and the ceilings and the walls). She can look at the butterflies until they rot, watch as their eyes twitch and the life slowly bleeds out of their wings. New ones come in every few months- she never bothers to keep track.

Her favorite one (the exception, the only one she’ll ever remember) is a Queen Alexandra Birdwing, scintillating hues of blue and green blending together with black, all the way from the Dutch East Indies. It twitches for longer than most of them, fights for weeks.

She wonders what it’d be like, to fly instead of running. She takes the pins out of its wings, waits for an eruption of blue and green and black to leave her speechless, take the breath from her like running will forever do.

The butterfly’s wings fall to the ground, and its head leaving a vague smudge of black as it twitches on the floor. It collects dust.

Hungary never goes back to that room.

.

Austria is easy, easier a breathing when there’s nothing pushing you forwards, when all that occupies your mind is standing still. Kissing him is like a photograph, where everything is perfectly still and manicured and  _perfect,_ and Hungary has the strangest thought that she could learn to love that.

She tries. She puts the winds and the forest (because that’s where she runs now, where she chases and fights her enemies and her fears and boys with white hair and cruel smiles that she’d never quite believed) and her knife down (she stashed it in a trunk near the back of the house; she’d sworn it still has flecks of Prussia’s blood on it). And she picks up a broom and a dress (it doesn’t fit her at first; she can’t quite figure out all the strings and then she pulls them too tight and her chest burns and she thinks  _this might work_ but it’s not, it’s a substitute). She kisses Austria and listens to him play and watches over Italy and sees the years slowly fade in and out.

And one day when a boy (he’s still a boy, then) comes by with a crossbow and a glint in his eyes and asks her if she’s not too lame to join him once again, she curves her lips into a frown and tells him, “No.” Watches the light go out from his eyes like a dying sunset, like a pinned butterfly.

That night, she dreams of running.

.

Halfway through the nineteenth century she picks up her bags and leaves. In her suitcase she has; two sets of clothes, three meals, a blood encrusted dagger, and roughly enough gold to keep her alive for two weeks.

She stays for five years.

She runs away, through Europe and past Russia and to the fields, as far as her legs will take her before collapsing, and then she gets up again, every day, until the language is foreign and the climate is scalding and the sky is a burningly bright blue.  She gets  _lost,_ so lost she's sure she'll never find  _home_ again.

At some point it all goes blurry and she forgets. She works so many jobs she can barely fathom how she only she used to only have one- wife, and before that country. She lifts barrels full of pickled cabbage and haggles on prices of bread cooked in clay pots and makes trinkets from spare wire and nicks the buttons off men in nice suits. Her hands are coated in callouses from moving stones and boxes and her arms are burnt from the hot sun and she gains such an aptitude for numbers sometimes she forgets words. She learns three languages, or maybe it was four- one of them’s Russian, but the others she wouldn’t know unless spoken to, forever nameless, drifting through the same backwaters of her memory as her language had been until someone took a leash to it, until they started calling her  _Hungary_ when all she’d ever been was  _Magyar._

When she comes back Austria tilts his head and asks her where she’s been. Her voice comes out wispy, weak, harshly accented. She hasn’t spoken German in a long, long time.

“Everywhere,” She says, and then, meeting his eyes, “Nowhere.”

.

When she comes back, Prussia just nods to her, his eyes unreadable (and she wonders when he learned to do that, when he stopped being her native language and turned into a foreign one). She can’t stand it.

She throws a knife at him and he catches it in midair, and his eyes light up in that crazed delight she knew would be the end of her, and suddenly-

She loses her breath, and she wasn’t even running.

She turns and sprints before he can catch her, runs before he looks into her eyes and sees something that was never there before, before he looks and can tell immediately where the pieces don't fit.

.

The night before that second war, Prussia is drinking and it’s just him and her and the night is cold, violent, and all Hungary can think is that is she were human, she would never stay in the same place for more than one day. She can’t understand their desire to be sedentary; fire runs in her veins and this land is the only thing that keeps her from burning everything she touches.

(Prussia has never been afraid of fire)

He leans on her, curling a hand over the flames of the fireplace (they never tell you this, but the hottest part of a fire is right above it) and his eyes meet hers, brilliantly red and flashing silver in the dimmed light. He leans across the infinitesimal gap that has always stood between them (it could be a river, a rivalry, the difference between running and staying still) and laces his fingers into hers. He’s bitter cold, but she likes that, because warmth is easy, and never in her life has Hungary wanted  _easy._

For as long as she lives Hungary knows Prussia will never tell her  _stay,_ and saying that word to him would be like pitching shattered pieces of glass into her eyes.

What she says instead is, “Run away with me.”

He pauses, and she tightens her grip around his fingers, thinks of suffocating, thinks of double suicide, twin corpses pinned like butterflies on the wall, and he says-

“I can’t.” And she hates hates hates those words, and maybe death was the right option because at least then she could run. (But she had tried; the scars never showed and the burns never killed and the poisons stuck in her throat, it was always running, running in circles and never in a straight line, running  _away_ from something instead of running _towards_ it. _)_

He leaves the next night, and from then on when she sees him it’s in uniform.

(She always hated uniforms- they were meant to keep you from running, remind you of all the things that made you stay behind.)

.

He dies on the twenty fifth of February, 1947. He asks her to do it. His eyes are shining silver and his last words are  _can you imagine that once I fell in love?_

And she laughs, laughs so hard she thinks her spine will break, and says,  _of course._

_I did too._

She slits his throat.

.

She wonders if he’s free, now. If he’s running. She wonders if these chains are worth it.

(During the daylight, it’s easy to tell herself  _yes._ She has friends and a lover, she has a beautiful nation and a home and someone to share it with.)

(During the night, it’s harder to lie.)

.

She still has dreams. They go like this; she’s running and running and  _running,_ but she doesn’t know where it’s too, she’s just sprinting into a haze of mist that blurs into fiery red at the edges, and her breath is ragged and her heart won’t stop beating, and she looks to her side only to see that he’s right there, beside her, and slowly the mist clears and she's that little girl in the plains again, that little girl who stuck knives in boy with pretty smiles and sharp words, and her grin could cut glass the same way her heartbeat slices bone. The sky stretches out over her, endless and endless and endless.

Those are the best dreams. The bad ones are where he isn’t there at all. The worst ones are when he leaves.

.

Because here’s the thing; Hungary lied for herself. Prussia lied for the people he loved.

And Hungary hadn’t even known such a thing existed until the day he died.

.

(She thinks she should’ve, thinks she should have known you can’t run forever.)

**Author's Note:**

> Notes
> 
> -The Hungarian people are thought to have come from the plains of Central Asia sometimes before the 800s. (This is supported by the fact that some of the closest languages to Hungarian are native Siberian languages!)
> 
> -The Hungarian government and the Teutonic Knights first cooperated to defend against the Turkic Cumans in 1211. 
> 
> -The Battle of Mohács took place during 1526, an incredible defeat of the Kingdom of Hungary against the Ottoman Empire. After that, the Kingdom of Hungary was partitioned, and in 1541 the capital city of Buda (now Budapest) fell to the Ottoman forces. 
> 
> -Austria-Hungary did not become a dual monarchy until 1867, where the Hungarians were given sovereignty and equal footing to the Austrian factions within the Kingdom. 
> 
> -Prussia was officially proclaimed to be dissolved by the Allied Council on the 25th of February, 1945.


End file.
